Report: Valve Working on "Steam Box" Console

The people who make Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead and Steam may be getting into the hardware game, according to a report from The Verge. According to the site's unspecified sources, Valve is working on a "Steam Box," a console-like platform that's designed to challenge not only the PlayStation and Xbox platforms, but Apple TV as well.

Oh, and apparently we might hear about it officially as early as next week at GDC 2012.

The Verge's report points to an open platform, a standardized PC box manufactured by a number of hardware partners, not by Valve itself. The "basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU," according to the report.

While the idea of Valve making the leap from games and software services to hardware design may seem… odd, the company has made allusions to it in the past.

"Well, if we have to sell hardware we will," Valve boss Gabe Newell said in an interview with the Penny Arcade Report recently. "We have no reason to believe we’re any good at it, it’s more we think that we need to continue to have innovation and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that’s what we’ll do."

The Verge's report says that the rumored Steam Box would possibly ship with a proprietary controller, perhaps with swappable input devices, and some sort of biometric feedback technology, either in the form of a bracelet or built into the controller itself.

What kind of biometrics? Well, here's what Newell had to say about the tech to PC Gamer magazine in 2010.

"With biometrics, rather than guessing, we can actually use a variety of things like gaze tracking, skin galvanic response, pulse rate and so on," Newell explained. "Through combining those pieces of information, we can get a much more accurate indication of player state, so that's something we're super interested in."

"If you're in a competitive situation and you see someone's heart rate go up, it's way more rewarding than we would have thought," he said. "And if you see somebody in a co-op game sweating, people tend to respond to that way more than we would have thought."

At last year's GDC, Valve introduced us to Steam's "Big Picture" mode, "offering simple, easy-to-read navigation designed specifically for TV" and "full controller support." Valve has not released that publicly, but if the Steam Box platform is happening, it seems that we'll see it soon enough.